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All Rise...

Judge Patrick Bromley cheated once. At solitaire. He feels guilty about it to this day.

The Charge

Why do we want what we can't have?

Opening Statement

John Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore finds its basis in two short
stories, the eponymous "We Don't Live Here Anymore" and
"Adultery," by acclaimed author Andre Dubus (who also provided the
inspiration for Todd Field's In the
Bedroom). It was awarded the Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting at last
year's Sundance Film Festival. It features a remarkable ensemble cast of
seasoned veterans and indie-All Stars. So, with all of this going for it, is the
movie any good?

Yes. Yes, it is.

Facts of the Case

Jack (Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count on
Me, 13 Going on 30) is married to
Terry (Laura Dern, Wild at Heart).
Hank (Six Feet Under's Peter Krause) is married to Edith (Naomi Watts, Mulholland Dr.). Jack and Hank teach
together at the local college. Terry and Edith are best friends. Jack and Edith
are sleeping together. Terry is considering sleeping with Hank, who sleeps with
anyone. Hank may or may not know about Jack and Edith. Jack loves Edith. Edith
loves Jack. Terry loves Jack. Jack loves Terry.

Marriage is complicated.

The Evidence

We Don't Live Here Anymore is the first of two partner-swapping dramas
released in 2004—the second one being Mike Nichols's more
widely-seen-and-appreciated Closer. The
Nichols film plays like a sociology experiment, reducing its characters to only
their desires and their cruelty—they're utterly self-absorbed and
single-minded. We Don't Live Here Anymore, on the other hand, humanizes
its characters; they have lives and jobs and families outside of their sexual
partnerships, and their reasons for infidelity extend beyond lust or ego.
Relationships are not a kind of battlefield for waging mental cruelty, but
rather sticky, messy, difficult puzzles that change and evolve every day. That's
why we don't just get the marital relationships; we get the relationships
between friends, between parents and children, between teachers and students,
between colleagues. These are people that have to shop for groceries, pay the
plumber, and get the oil changed on the car—cheating does not define their
existence; it merely provides a temporary escape from it. Curran captures the
minutiae of everyday suburban life with a kind of heightened reality in
sequences that alternate between darkly comic and pretentious; there is the
occasional tendency to take his (admittedly beautiful) visual language to an
almost self-conscious extreme.

The movie's tagline is inaccurate; the film is not about wanting what we
don't have, but rather about whether or not we want what we do have. The
characters that inhabit the movie's universe have found themselves unprepared
for what their lives have turned out to be, and awakening to that realization
has led to a kind of restless dissatisfaction. It is here that infidelity enters
the picture, not as a means of achieving something greater than what one has,
but rather as a means of avoiding one's current situation—escape by way of
self-destruction. It's easy for critics to write a film like this off as
"unpleasant" or "unlikable"—it's about unhappy
individuals hurting one another, intentionally or otherwise—but such an
attitude is far too dismissive. Curran has not made an unpleasant film, but
rather one that is challenging, often painful, often beautiful, and which offers
greater rewards with greater investment.

This is not the first film to deal with adultery—that's a rather long
list—but it is one of the first I've seen to consider the lives of
the characters in context to the choices they make (Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful, minus the disastrous
third-act turn, also comes to mind). Unlike, say, the picture-perfect housewife
cheated on by Michael Douglas in Fatal
Attraction, Laura Dern's Terry has flaws—she drinks too much, she's
disorganized, messy, and a little lazy. That's not to say that any of her
shortcomings somehow excuse Jack's behavior, but simply acknowledges that we're
dealing with people here and not cardboard cutouts (a notion overlooked
even in the previously mentioned Unfaithful, where the Richard Gere
husband character was too much of a saint to raise the right questions in
viewers' minds). Interesting, too, that the two most openly flawed characters
are also the only realists; though more screen time is devoted to Jack and
Edith, it is Terry and Hank who are able to be honest with themselves about who
they really are and what they want from their respective marriages (Hank on
fidelity: "Love as many people as you can while you can"). Terry, for
all of her foibles, also proves to be the smartest one in the film—not
only in an intuitive sense (even before admitting it, she is aware of Jack's
wandering), but also in having the wisdom to wholly accept Jack as he is, rather
than an idealized or romanticized vision of who she hoped he would be, and the
confidence and security to demand that he do the same. That Terry is the Soul of
the movie is due in large part to Laura Dern's intense and fearless performance;
her work here rivals that of Rambling Rose and reminds us that Dern is
one of our most underrated actresses.

The screenplay for We Don't Live Here Anymore was awarded the
prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting award at last year's Sundance Film
Festival, but suggesting that only its script is deserving of accolades is a
mistake. It's a fine piece of writing, but not the only thing that makes the
film work; it's the combination of the script and Curran's nuanced
direction and the work of a first-rate cast that give We Don't Live
Here Anymore its power. Mark Ruffalo, here as in xx/yy, is redefining
the flawed American male for a new generation (Michael Douglas took care of the
generation prior); his rumpled, sleepy looks and casual slur suggest a man
trapped at the threshold of adulthood—his disheveled appearance
none-too-subtly reflecting the chaos of his life. Naomi Watts (who, between this
film and I Heart Huckabees, seems to
have the market cornered on icy perfection) is afforded what might be the film's
best moment; more is said about her character and her marriage in that last line
delivered to her husband than in the entire sum of the preceding scenes.

Warner Bros. delivers a technically accomplished but anorexic disc for We
Don't Live Here Anymore. The film is presented in an attractive looking
2.35:1 anamorphic transfer, complete with sharp detail and accurate, warm hues.
The Dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack is effective, too, keeping the movie's dialogue
front and center while still maintaining a strong balance with the music and
effects. The disc's biggest fault lies in its almost total lack of supplemental
material: no commentary, no interviews, no text reproductions of Dubus's
original stories—just the film's theatrical trailer is provided as an
extra.

Closing Statement

We Don't Live Here Anymore is reminiscent of 1970s cinema, in that
it's entirely character and dialogue-driven, and deals with adult themes and
subject matter in a very personal manner. Of course, just about any film not
based on a franchise, TV show, or video game, or that isn't entirely reliant on
CG effects is said to be "reminiscent of the '70s" these days, but
We Don't Live Here Anymore warrants such a comparison—it's one of
the better relationship dramas of recent years, good enough to make even Paul
Mazursky proud.